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Helen Dunmore

±«Óătv Arts and Radio 4 bring you Helen Dunmore's The Betrayal - the sequel to her award winning novel The Siege. Read by Sara Kestelman, it was originally broadcast in 10 parts as a Book at Bedtime in December 2010.

  • Helen Dunmore returns to the Soviet Union, whose history she so powerfully evoked in her earlier best-seller The Siege. A decade later, the cold and starvation of Leningrad has been replaced with fear and suspicion.

From the archive

  • Helen Dunmore discusses the background and themes of The Betrayal with Jane Garvey on Woman's Hour on Radio 4.

  • With her love of Russian history and literature, Dunmore was invited by Radio 3 to present an Essay on Tolstoy for the 100th anniversary of his death.

  • Dunmore talks to James Naughtie on Radio 4 Bookclub in 2001 about her novel Talking to the Dead

  • Dunmore was invited to pen a ghost story for Hammer Books in 2012. She talks to Mariella Frostrup about the supernatural tale on Radio 4's Open Book.

Find out more

  • (www.helendunmore.com)
Helen Dunmore (Getty)

About the author

Award-winning writer Helen Dunmore is the celebrated author of numerous novels for adults and children, and several poetry collections.

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She won the McKitterick Prize for her debut novel Zennor in Darkness in 1994, which imagines DH Lawrence’s life in Cornwall during World War One.

The Yorkshire-born author then won the inaugural Orange Prize for Fiction in 1996 with her third novel A Spell of Winter, where two siblings find forbidden love and dark family secrets in their grandfather’s house prior to the First World War.

Dunmore was shortlisted for both the Whitbread Novel Award and the Orange Prize for her 2001 book, The Siege. Set during the 1941 siege of Leningrad, two pairs of lovers, Anna and Andrei, Anna’s father and the banned actress Marina, must endure the inescapable privations and horrors.

In The Betrayal, Dunmore takes her readers back to Leningrad. She takes up the story a decade on, when life is defined by the fear and repression of Stalin’s terrible regime. The Betrayal was long-listed for the 2010 Man Booker Prize and was a ±«Óătv Radio 4 Book at Bedtime.

In 2012 The Greatcoat was also broadcast as a Book at Bedtime. The supernatural tale was the first novel released by Hammer Books, and was followed up with her 2014 novel, The Lie.

Dunmore read English at the University of York and then taught English in Finland for two years. Here she began writing the poems which became her first collection The Apple Fall, published in 1983. Her poem The Malarkey won the National Poetry Competition in 2009.

She has also enjoyed success with younger audiences. Her first children’s book was 1992’s Going to Egypt. In 2005 she published Ingo, the first of the enchanting series set in a world beneath the sea off Cornwall’s coast.

Dunmore was Chair of the Society of Authors in 2005, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She has reviewed books for The Times, The Guardian and The Observer, and has judged the ±«Óătv National Short Story Award, the TS Eliot Prize and Whitbread Book of the Year.

Elizabeth Allard, ±«Óătv Readings Unit

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